Even as I’m trying to promote Attacked Beneath Antarctica, I’m also working further along the series. As I mentioned previously, Book 4 is already written, so I’m working on Book 5.

At the moment I’m about a fifth of the way through the first draft of what I’m calling “The Sunkiller Affair.” I don’t want to say too much in case I change my mind, and I still have to get Giant Robots of Tunguska out the door first, but I can say that it’s already developing its own personality.

Now that book three is out, it’s time to talk about where I go from here with the Doc Vandal series.

The next step is book 4, which is completely written and just needs some editing to be released. Meanwhile, I’m working on book 5 and have a few ideas percolating for book 6. Currently, book 5 looks to be set almost entirely in the United States and will close out 1937 for our characters.

My biggest problem with the series, speaking as a writer, is that I have too many ideas. Every episode of Ancient Aliens gives me a seed for another two or three adventures.

Enjoy the books that are already out, and if enough of you like them I’ll keep going.

As of one o’clock this morning I finished the draft of Giant Robots of Tunguska, bringing it home at 53,839 words. I created the Scrivener document on the evening of February 20th, and finished it in the early morning of May 25th– so it took me three months and five days to write making it my fastest ever novel.

Now it’s planning the next one, editing book three, and looking at the other novels I have in the drafting stages.

It’s launch day. Air Pirates of Krakatoa is now live in the Kindle store. It’s been a long slog, over two years since I finished the first draft, but it’s available now.

This was the one that really determined the direction of the series; so much so that I went back and revised Against the Eldest Flame so that it fit better with the sequel. Characters found their own voices and their world opened up.

In the old days, pulp writers were incredibly prolific, often pumping out a pulp novel of anywhere from forty to sixty thousand words in a week. That’s even more impressive when you realize this was done on manual typewriters, and any author who wanted to hit deadlines pretty much had to get it right on the first draft.

Eighty years later, we have it much easier. Word processors have eliminated the need for retyping entire manuscripts. With programs like Scrivener we can organize everything and even write out of order.

That’s great for all of us who want to express ourselves as writers, but how does it relate to the pulps.

One reason the pulps read at such a breakneck pace is because they were written at a breakneck pace.

Now you could go out and get a manual typewriter and give yourself a tight deadline and see if that produces the same effect, but most of us aren’t going to do that. What you can do is give yourself the freedom to go crazy.

Take that first draft, and whenever things start to slow down throw in a wild threat that you make up on the spot. Throw both yourself and the characters off-balance. It may not work in the long run, but that’s the advantage of technology; if it doesn’t work, just kill it in the rewrite.

That’s part of how I write Doc Vandal — When I don’t know what to do I just have something giant and mechanical smash through the wall.

Enjoy everything you write. If you don’t, how can you expect your readers to?